In a story in Monday’s New York Times, Michael Cieply writes that 300 is being viewed as a commentary on George Bush’s war. It’s not hard to find parallelsâ€"but you can easily make the case in whatever direction you please (Bush as the implacable Xerxes, Bush as the freedom-loving Leonidas). I can’t take any of that too seriously. Still, if it provokes a lively argument around your watercooler on Monday morning, go for it.

Miller’s graphic novel (with colorist Lynn Varley) was published in 1999, and plans to film it began soon after. It clearly predates the current war, and even the Bush presidency. That it comes out when it does, at a time when more and more Americans are growing heartsick at our involvement in an ill-planned war whose casualties seem to have no end in sight, is an accident of Hollywood production cycles. At a press junket for 300 in Los Angeles last month, I asked director Zack Snyder how he felt about his movie, with its cry “Prepare for glory!” reaching audiences at a time when they have a real war on their minds.

“I guess that’s unavoidable,” he sighed. “I’m not going to pretend to be like, ‘What’s that, Iraq? There’s a war going on? What are you talking about?’ That’s a reality of the world. I tried to make a movie that looks at the nobility of conflict, that asks if there is such a thing. I didn’t do it in relationship to what’s happening now because I don’t have that much foresightâ€"I wish I had. The point is that there can be nobility in sacrifice. Does that give context to sacrifice that we’ve maybe lost in the muddle of our current situation, is there a way to get that back? And also, the story is 2,500 years old. Does history have some bad habit of being a big circle? Yeah. But is that part of my design? I don’t think so.”